First day of the season so we had to break a lot of trail in a heavy snow year. We decided to overnight at Muir but because of the snow conditions and traffic getting to Paradise we ended up only being able to sleep for 1 hour there. Should have just left packs and went c2c, 1 hour's sleep is not worth the heavy weight! Tons of slogging, not an interesting route.

Those RMI dudes can sure lay down a trail. Must've been 8 guided parties over a couple of days. Made it pretty easy for us 3. Was warm though so we climbed through the night, summit at 0100, nice night view of Seattle.

Summited via the Ingrham Direct on an amazingly sunny day. A 4-person rope team broke through a bench into a cravase only 20 minutes after my team crossed it. I punced through in another up to my knees. The day before I summited a guide fell into a steam vent on the summit and got airlifed out.

Summitted with a great crew doing a five-day RMI program. Good snow conditions and great clear weather made this experience wonderful. Could see all the way past Mt Hood to Mt Jefferson in Oregon. Great views from the top. 5.5 hours up to the top.

Some big crevasses with ladders across them courtesy of the guide services and some icefall potential following the direct line up through the ingraham. The DC was shedding a lot of rock though so it's a hard choice - ice fall or rockfall.

Beautiful weather and lots of snow made "Ingraham Glacier Direct" the preferred summit route. There were many crevasses that we had to cross along this route; if we had waited another week or two, this route might not have been an option due to the hot sun opening up the crevasses. Reaching the summit made the whole experience, as tiresome as it was, worthwhile. I will never look at that mountain the same way again! WOOHOO!

After turning back above the cleaver due to a late start and extremely warm weather, my partner and I were coming back down the ID when I punched through the roof of a crevasse I didn't see. I fell about 30 meters while roped onto an ice block wedged between crevasse walls. Scary but it was a very good learning experience.

Jim Hinkhouse, Dick Wright, and I summited via Ingraham Direct about a month before the first OSAT climb in June 1991. It was the first of 3 Rainier summit climbs Jim did that month, and two for Dick and I. One of the pictures from that climb appears in the the NorthWest Mountaineering Journal article about Hinkhouse Peak.
http://www.mountaineers.org/nwmj/05/051_Hinkhouse.html

I led a successful OSAT climb up the same route in 2001 - 9 of 12 of us summited, one rope team turned around when 2 climbers had headlamp problems.